Open source and secret sauce

Open source router outperforming Cisco device in test revives the “commodity” vs. “special purpose” debate

By Kevin Tolly, Network World, 04/11/07

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A few weeks back, one of The Tolly Group’s testing clients got a fair bit of press when it announced test results showing that its open source, Fast Ethernet router outperformed Cisco’s 2821 Integrated Services Router.

“Twice the performance at half the price:" The emergence of enterprise-class, open source solutions is yet another chapter in a “commodity” vs. “special purpose” battle that has been raging for several decades now. Well on its way to becoming IT’s version of The Thirty Years' War, the struggle has gone hot and cold over the years – but it has never gone away.

We’ve all experienced this struggle in one way or another. The vendor that has “something special” – invariably described as “secret sauce” when it's briefing analysts -- wants to convince you that this special hardware is a key reason why you should buy its product vs. the competitor's, which uses conventional, off-the-shelf components. It is an interesting ploy, and one that often is successful when rhetoric rather than empirical information is used to win the argument

Ask a reasonable person whether a specialized router crafted by a leading vendor with a no doubt substantial budget possibly could be outperformed by “free” software “thrown together” by a loose band of programmers. Should be no contest. Of course it was no contest – but not the way you would have thought going in.

Granted, neither of these devices delivered wire-speed throughput at all frame sizes. And there certainly are devices we have tested that do. The open source entry did outperform Cisco's in every test, however. And “half the price” is really only half the truth. The open source offering is free. Its cost was related primarily to the Dell server that is the appliance the open source product uses.

When we ran this test, I couldn’t help but think back to some of the earliest tests we ran -- back in 1991 -- involving WAN internetworking.. These were the first steps in corporate networks in the post-mainframe network era. Even then we saw such vendors as Cisco and Wellfleet (later Bay Networks and then Nortel) putting forth proprietary, "special purpose" operating systems with proprietary I/O bus architectures. On the other side were vendors, such as IBM and Microcom, that used a "standard" PC as the basic bridge platform, to which one added standard LAN interfaces and each vendor's WAN interface card that could plug into a standard PC interface slot.

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